


Wonderfully Human

by magicites



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Kingdom Hearts, Crossover, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-28 16:43:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/309906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magicites/pseuds/magicites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Nepeta Leijon loses her heart, becomes a Nobody, and rediscovers the feeling of falling in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wonderfully Human

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on the kink meme.

Three things make up a person and give them their humanity: a heart, a mind, and a soul. If someone is missing even one of those three things, they’re no longer considered a person.

Once, you were a person. You were just a plain, little girl in a plain, little world. You can’t remember your old name, but you do remember a few other things. You lived in a small cave-house that you loved to cover in paintings of your friends, and your lusus, Pounce de Leon, took care of you. She was a good lusus, kind and considerate and loving.

You remember the night you stopped being a person and started being a _thing_ , the same night you lost your lusus. Some of the memories jumble together and get lost in the muddled fog inside of your head, but other parts stand out crystal clear. You can never forget how the tendrils of darkness climbed up Pounce’s snowy white fur, and the yowl that left her two mouths and pierced right through your heart.

You’ll never forget the fear that coursed through your body, the blood pounding in your ears louder than your own frightened screams. You remember ripping the monsters off of her and trying desperately to stop the olive green blood leaking through the twisted gashes criss-crossing all over her body. You remember the feeling of wet, thick tears leaking down your face as you fought the shadows off with nothing but the claws attached to your gloves.

The rest of that night is a haze, one that you’ve never been able to reach through, even after all of this time. The next thing you do remember, though, is waking up to see a girl’s face just inches away from your own. Her eyes were cloudy and blank, surrounded by expanses of rough, alien gray skin. Two horns spiraled out of her head, softly resting in her tangled black locks.

She introduced herself as Aradia Megdio, leader of some group called the Zodiac that consisted of herself and several other Nobodies.

“You’re now a Nobody,” she explained, her voice as hollow and empty as her eyes.

“But...how?”

“Simple.” She pressed her hand against your chest, ignoring the still wet blood covering your shirt. “The Heartless took your heart, but your body remained...for the most part.”

“Fur the most part?”

She nodded and stood up, offering a hand down to help you up. “Come with me, and I shall take you to your new home. There, you can see just how you have changed.”

As you later found out, Nobodies no longer look human once they lose their hearts. Many similarities remain, but instead a Nobody looks like some demented half-breed, not quite human but not quite Heartless. Only the true Elite Nobodies could somehow remotely pass for human; even then, there’s no mistaking the ashy gray skin and the colorful horns that sprout out of their heads as human.

You’re one of the Elites, able to keep not only your soul, but your mind and rationality as well. You’re so close to being human, but the gap inside of you where your heart once was is a constant reminder that you’re nothing. According to Aradia, none of you are supposed to exist. You belong to neither the realm of light nor the realm of darkness, and you are all doomed to languish in a state of non-being unless you get your hearts back.

Most of her speeches fly right over your head, so you don’t really focus on all of that. You simply live day by day, repeating the routines you went through as a human in a desperate attempt to grab and hold onto that brief spark of feeling that you occasionally get. It’s dulled down to the point of barely being recognized, but it fills the void within you, and so you constantly strive to get that feeling whenever you can.

Everything changes the day you meet the 12th member of the Zodiac. His name is Karkat Vantas, and he’s a strange boy, real and raw and white-hot with _true_ emotion. He’s prickly and sharp, with a barbed tongue and a flair for vulgar insults.

He’s the most amazing thing you’ve ever encountered. You haven’t even talked to him, but occasionally you’ll hear him stomping throughout the giant castle you all call home, screaming insults at anything that happens to cross his path. He never lays a hand – or sickle – on his targets, instead choosing to verbally assault them until they slink off.

But Karkat Vantas stays as nothing more than a passing thought in the back of your head until the day you get paired up on a mission with him. When Equius, the second most powerful member, right beneath Aradia in rank, hands you the slip with your mission objective on it, you slide it into your coat’s pocket as Karkat approaches you.

“Oh, so you’re the nookstain I was partnered up with today. Aren’t you the Rouge of Heart or some shit like that? Why the fuck would we even need a Rogue of Heart? We’re Nobodies, we don’t even have hearts!”

You giggle at his exasperation. The sound is strange and foreign to your ears, and your laugh sounds rough, like a broken toy slowly coming back to life.

Your mission is just simple recon in some place called the Land of Wind and Shade, but due to Karkat’s snide remarks, it quickly becomes your new favorite place. You’re laughing at every other curse that comes out of his mouth, and that only makes him more irritated, sending him into flailing fits of rage. By the end of the day, his new name is Karkitty, and you now apparently go by Autistic Catgirl.

Karkat often ends up partnered with you on missions, and it doesn’t take long at all for you to notice a change within yourself. You’re laughing all the time now, and cat puns start slipping into your speech again. You stopped doing that just a few weeks after you lost your heart, and yet once you start spending time with Karkat, they return with a purrowerful vengeance. (The funny thing is, Karkat can’t stand them, but you soon you start to think he’s only lying to keep up appearances. Sometimes, when no one is looking, he’ll roll his eyes at the pun, instead of laying a verbal smackdown on you.)

The biggest change comes when you start to feel as if you aren’t really just a Nobody. The emptiness that plagued you for so long dims down whenever you’re with him, and sometimes, when you don’t think about it, you can almost feel a heartbeat steadily thumping away inside of your chest.

Karkat makes you feel as if you’re not just a Nobody. He’s so wonderfully human, that he makes you feel the same.

You go up to him one day and greet him like you always do, with a playful giggle and a, “good night, Karkitty!” and you see the faintest twitch of a smile cross his lips as he says your name. That’s when it clicks inside of you.

Nobody or not, he makes you feel as if you never lost your heart at all.

And, heart or no heart be damned, you think you may be falling in love with him.

 


End file.
